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Slides from Designing Calm Technology at Esri’s International User Conference

Last Thursday I gave a lightning talk on Designing Calm Technology as part of the User Experience (UX) & User Interface (UI) Summit Esri’s International User Conference 2014 in San Diego, California. You can view the slies here!

Talk Description

The world around is made up of information that competes for our attention. How much is necessary? How much is not?
We cannot interact with our everyday life in the same way we interact with a desktop computer. Xerox PARC researchers John Seely Brown and Mark Weiser believed that “technology shouldn’t require all of our attention, just some of it, and only when necessary”. Take a teapot, for example. It tells us when it is ready, and is off or quiet the rest of the time. If technology works well, we can ignore it most of the time.

Calm technology describes a state of technological maturity where a user’s primary task is not computing, but being human. The idea behind Calm Technology is to have smarter people, not things.

This talk is a short introduction on how to use principles of Calm Technology in product design, and what we will need to do in order to manage the next generation of connected devices in our human landscape. It is a companion to the newly launched resource CalmTechnology.com